Androgyny and the BSRI

• Androgyny describes someone who, from a psychological standpoint, displays a balance of both ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics.
• This may include a woman who enjoys playing football, actively researches the latest sports cars and may also be aggressive.
• Androgyny can be viewed from two perspectives - personality and appearance.
• An androgynous personality is described above, whereas an androgynous appearance would be one which is obviously neither male nor female.
• In order to measure this ‘balance’, Bem (1974) developed the Bem Sex Role Inventory.
• The Bem Sex Role Inventory consists of 20 items that represent typically male characteristics, 20 representing typically female characteristics and 20 representing neutral characteristics.
• Participants rate their own personality on a 7-point Likert scale, which is then measured across the two dimensions of androgyny (or undifferentiated) and masculinity (or femininity).
• The major methodological issue with Bem’s scale is that it is a self-report measure.
• Androgyny is a type of gender and so can be considered a social construct, making it a very subjective idea and each individual will have differing opinions about the extent to which they are androgynous.
• Sex, on the other hand, is biologically-determined and can be objectively measured.
• Bem’s BSRI may be considered an over-simplification of such a complex and subjective social construct as gender, as suggested by Golombok and Fivush (1994).
• Golombok and Fivush suggested that the BSRI does not consider smaller, but still important, aspects of gender and androgyny, such as a person’s interests.
• The Personal Attribute Questionnaire (PAQ) may be a more suitable alternative to the BSRI, as it measures personality along different, but more ‘personal’ dimensions i.e. expressivity and instrumentality.